The Simply Smarter® program is built upon the foundation of neuroplasticity, utilizing the science of targeted input, frequency, intensity, and duration.

Targeted

The program constantly modifies itself to keep you right at the sweet spot, the spot that is targeted for you to achieve maximum benefit.

Frequency

To take advantage of neuroplasticity, we need to keep triggering the firing of neurons and reinforcing neural networks. Everyone is encouraged to use the program once or twice a day and preferably four or more days a week.

Intensity

This is an incredibly important piece. The importance of intensity cannot be overstated. How you or your child approach every session is going to determine how much the program impacts, changes, and develops the brain. Just doing it isn’t enough; you must do it with real intensity and with intention. Every activity is very short. It was designed that way so that you could create and maintain maximum attention and intensity for the seconds needed to complete each piece that you are asked to process, to watch, or listen to. Approach every sequence of every activity with the intention of remembering it, of nailing it!

If your children are using the program, sit with them, if you can, and cheer them on. The program has built-in rewards and acknowledgement, but a parent’s power is much greater, and we encourage you to provide very meaningful, big rewards for new high scores or higher digit spans. These changes can be life changing, treat them as such.

We realize that it’s not reasonable for many parents to sit in while their child does Simply Smarter®, so we have built in the means to send email and text alerts so that Mom, Dad, grandparents, coaches, whoever will know when the child did well; and each can provide their own congratulations, making every step forward all that more meaningful. Dad coming home from work and immediately acknowledging Johnny’s new high score or a call from Grandma can be very powerful.

For adults be honest with yourselves. Sitting down with good energy, intensity, and with the intention of knocking it out of the park each time is difficult. You are not only allowed but encouraged to set up your own rewards program—rewards for all new high scores. Set digit span and processing power goals, and when you hit it, reward it. It’s only your life and future that you are changing!

Duration

To change the brain, we need to keep causing those networks of brain cells to keep firing together. The longer we do it, the greater the change. Keep in mind that generally without specific intervention the development of processing, short-term memory and working memory, slows virtually to a halt at about seven years of age, creeps a tiny bit forward from then until we are in our twenties, and then usually begins a slow decline that continues throughout our life unless we target it, address it, and build it!

Simply Smarter® is an invaluable tool that has the potential to change the lives of your children, your parents, and yourselves.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 33 No. 7, 2020 ©NACD

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What is the purpose of your program? Many of you approach your program as if the goal were to check off a lot of boxes. That’s not the goal. The goal is to produce change. It’s easy to lose track of where we are going and to get lost in the process. As you are looking at your one thing, think about goals. Think about those important things that we are trying to change or develop and focus and work with intention.

Intention is working with a targeted mental focus for the purpose of producing a specific future change.

One of the most glaring things I see when reviewing program videos are folks obviously working without intention, which results in very slow progress. I wouldn’t want to count all the processing videos I have watched that made me want to scream. As most of you know, developing processing skills is rather foundational and really important. You should also know that even an incremental change in processing results in wonderful things, like better understanding, increased language, increase in global maturity, improved behavior, and better cognition-global change! Understanding this importance, many families justly prioritize their processing activities; but what I often see are parents doing the activities without a lot of intensity, which means they are doing it without intention. I often have to pay very close attention to the videos to determine if the child is getting the sequences right or wrong because watching the feedback from the parent or helper, there wasn’t much difference in the response, whether the sequence was done correctly or not. Without quality feedback and reinforcement your child isn’t even going to know what the goal is and certainly is not going to be working with intention.

To digress a tad, on my last trip to our Cincinnati chapter, where I work out of a hotel that sits on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, just across from the city of Cincinnati, I renewed my perspective on intention and intensity. Often on these trips I take a little walk along the river after I have my dinner and before I go back to my room to address more emails. Looking across the river I can see both the Cincinnati football and baseball stadiums. The Ohio River is a big river, and although the stadiums sit close to the river’s edge, they are still quite a way away. During the baseball season the Cincinnati Reds play, and during the football season the Cincinnati Bengals play. If I happen to be out in the evening and a game is being played, there is absolutely no question if someone gets a hit or a homerun or a team scores a touchdown. On this last trip, I was walking and looking out at the stadium when a touchdown was scored by the Bengals. The roar of the crowd from where I was across the river was almost deafening, and then the sky lit up with fireworks. The intention is to win the game, and it is understood that to win the game you need to get hits or advance the ball on the football field. The fans react with intensity to each of these events. There is no question of the intention of the players or the fans. It is also not surprising that teams in cities with good fans who help generate intensity and keep the players focused on the intention do well.

The goal of working on processing is to raise the processing level, preferably quickly. Watching these videos, it becomes blatantly obvious that more often than not the intention is to complete the activity and check off the box. I’m sure as the parent pushes themselves and their child through the activity, they think that they just need to do this another few hundred or thousand times and their child will move forward and ultimately, they probably will. But if we address not only processing activities, but also everything we do with our kids with intention, we can meet our goals faster, and generally much, much faster.

As an example of how we can create intention, I will at times do processing activities with criteria. What this means is that rather than doing a processing activity for a specific duration, such as a minute or two, we do the activity with a target. For example, if we are just starting to get auditory digit spans of five, working with criteria we will let the child know that the goal of the session is to get a five. As soon as they get a five, we have a party and the session ends. Their intention is no longer just to cooperate, to try or pretend that they are trying; it is to get a five! And our intention is no longer to check off a box, it is to get a five. It can be amazing to see how much faster we can move forward when the intention is clearly defined, and the child is receiving good feedback.

One of keys to focus and intention is data and attention to detail. If you are working on teaching your child to identify pictures, read words, recognize numbers, or complete a math process, you can only work with intention if you know where you are and where you are going. For example, if you are trying to develop your child’s sight word vocabulary you need to know what they know. Perhaps you have shown them 50 new words over a month or so. How many do they know? If I were flashing them the words, I would periodically stop on a word and ask them what it was or start a review session by testing a few words. I would mentally keep track of how many of the words they know, about what percentage they know, and even what types of words. Armed with some data we can do a number of things. If you provide your coach and evaluator with the data, they can make recommendations to do everything from change frequencies and durations, to how many new words are being introduced, to what kinds of words to introduce, or even to putting it away for a while. If the data is simply that we have checked off x number of boxes over these weeks, that doesn’t really help us reach our goal. The intention of every session should be to succeed, to teach your child to read more words; and to do that within each session, you need to be gathering data and work with intention.

Intention is every bit as important for every other aspect of program, whether we are teaching a child to walk properly, to track better, or to love looking at pictures. With absolutely every activity we do, we need to be mindful of what we are trying to achieve; and we need to be observant and constantly adjusting, modifying, and gathering data. Our intention is to produce new function, new abilities and to change your child’s life one piece, one step at a time.

I find intention to be a fascinating neurological phenomenon. You can consciously start doing something with intention, but then your brain appears to learn to apply it without conscious effort. As an example, through the years I have had children read short non-fiction articles as part of their program, primarily to improve reading comprehension. Generally, it would appear to the parent who was working with the child during the day that the child was engaged, and since we were working to develop reading comprehension, that they were actually reading to learn. I would on occasion have the parents do an experiment. The experiment was quite simple: at dinner after everyone had sat at the table, but before anyone was allowed to start eating, I would have the child’s father ask them what the story they had read earlier was about. Many parents were shocked when they discovered that their child couldn’t even remember the subject, let alone any of the content. A common answer from children to the question, “What did you learn at school today?” is “Nothing.” If the family repeated this for a few days, the child would start remembering more and more about the story; and if the parents randomly asked the dinner question, the child would usually maintain their new intention, which was not just to read the story, listen to the story, and answer specific questions immediately after reading the story, but to learn and try to retain the information. After the first couple of days I’m sure the child, when they sat down to do their story, was not consciously thinking, “I need to remember this because Dad is going to ask me about it at dinner.” The child’s brain had changed and was applying greater intensity to recalling the information on an ongoing basis. Your brain adapts and changes and even generalizes intention. Very cool!

One Final Note on Intention

Parents generally work with a child with better intention than anyone who is paid. As a parent there are a lot of things you could do with your day rather than work with your child. You don’t do it because you’re getting paid; and actually, many of you could be out doing things for pay if you weren’t home working with your child. You do what you do because your intention is to help your child. Even for you it can be tough keeping your focus and working each activity with the needed intention.

If you are having people help with program implementation or even sending your child to school or therapy, the issue of intention becomes significantly greater. If working with a child or children is a job, often the job is defined as implementing specific methods as best you can. Not a bad objective, but it’s not the right objective. The intention should be to produce results—good results and fast results. One of the frustrations I face every day of my life is educators, therapists, and even physicians applying the same methodologies day after day and week after week and year after year, in spite of that fact that they haven’t worked or haven’t worked well or worked fast enough. It is easy for people to get stuck in the rut of “this is what we do and how we do it and so be it,” regardless of the results or lack of.

Sorry for the little digression—back to program helpers. It is more difficult for people getting paid to help with program to achieve and maintain the proper intention than it is even for parents. As parents and bosses and supervisors, part of your job is to train your helpers well, clearly define the intention, quiz them on the data, and tie their efforts to achievement of the intended results, not checking off boxes. You might find it interesting to note that historically volunteers do a better job maintaining intention than people who are paid, and often the more people are paid, the poorer job they do of program implementation and working with intention. Obviously there are exceptions, but if you are not getting paid or if the pay is minimal, it is more likely that the primary goal it to help the child.

On occasions where we have had siblings help with program, we encourage good intention not by paying the kids or even rewarding them for their time, but for results. It has been fun watching how fast things can change if we do something like, “When Johnny can do two 5s in row, we are all going to go out for dinner and to a movie.” Everyone’s intention is tied to their successfully hitting the target.

Fifty years ago, when I started doing this work, I heard comments such as, “You must be a very patient person,” or, “You need a lot of patience to work with handicapped children.”

I’m not a patient person. To the contrary, I’m quite impatient, which is why I am constantly creating and looking for better ways to do everything. My intention is, and your intention needs to be, to be impatient, to work with intention, and to make it right, make it better, and to improve your child’s life. With our joint focus and intention and, yes, some impatience, we can do it.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 32 No. 1, 2019 ©NACD

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In an effort to help our NACD families and others maximize their efforts and make the most out of the time they have to work with their children, it is incredibly important to keep reminding everyone about the significance of intensity.

The foundation of what we do at NACD is designing very targeted individualized programs that are created to help provide the maximum results, relative to the time invested. The significance of being targeted is that we stimulate and change the brain when we apply specific, organized, targeted input with the necessary frequency, intensity, and duration. Random input is just noise to the brain; disorganized input is irrelevant to the brain; and any input that is not received by the brain with intensity never happened.

We understand that intensity, the most important of the Super 3 (frequency, intensity, and duration), is not entirely a reflection of how loud or strong or exciting we are when working with our kids. The big factor is what the intensity is with which they are processing the input. Have you ever seen someone fall asleep at a party or in a movie theater or sporting event? These are all intense environments; but if that person is asleep, it has zero intensity for their brains—it didn’t happen. I recall the question I heard way back when in school—“if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, did it make a sound?” It’s not about you, it’s about them. Back to the folks at the party-how about if they are not asleep, but just dozing? Or, they just had a fight with their significant other and are running through the last argument in their mind one more time, or have a song stuck in their head that keeps going around and around. How much did all that “intensity” that is going on impact them? Probably not much. Ultimately intensity is based on how the individual is receiving/processing the input.

I have always related intensity and impact on a scale of 1-10. If something goes into a brain with the intensity of 9 or 10, learning is virtually instantaneous. Drop it down to 7-8 and we need a fair amount of frequency and duration to change the brain. If the intensity is only a 6, we need a lot of frequency and duration—many times per day and lots of days, weeks, or months. At a 5 we are in for a very long haul. And below a 5, we are better off taking a nap.

Let’s look at some of the things that affect intensity, starting with physiological issues. Diet is one of the things we talk about with all parents. I won’t get into the specifics of diet in this article but suffice it to say that if you feed your kids pancakes with syrup for breakfast, just send them back to bed and forget about school. Sleep is another foundational issue, and doing what is needed for both you and your child to get enough sleep is very important. So before we go any further, let’s see where we are. If what you are trying to put into your child’s brain is super exciting to them and they love it, they ate some good protein, had a great night’s sleep, and feel wonderful, you might get them to an 8. Trying to input something they might like but don’t love, drop to a 7; not a wonderful breakfast, drop to a 6; and then you were up with them for half of the night, we just dropped to a 5, and perhaps you are both getting ready for a nap.

Just yesterday I had a talk with a very nice family, great, concerned parents who have a teenage son on the autism spectrum. He has had a few small seizures that did not appear to have any residual effect and is on two different anti-convulsive medications. His doctors have also put him on two additional drugs that are used for schizophrenia and irritability. When I look at this boy, he looks like he is about to fall over with his eyes open. He’s at a 2-3 for intensity, and if you work hard, you can push him briefly to a 4, and on rare occasion to a 5. Under the circumstances we hope to maintain what function he has until these medications that all slow his brain down can be altered or eliminated.

Drugs that are used for seizure control and behavior and attention control are slowing down the brain. As a side note, the neurologists and neurosurgeons that I worked with almost 50 years ago were aware that the vast majority of seizures actually caused no harm, and my clinical observations over all of these years verify it; but we still have neurologists who see their mission as stopping all seizures, regardless of the fact that they are medicating the child to the point where there can be virtually no development. I’ve been happy to hear that after 50 years, there are a few neurologists acknowledging that not all seizures spell the end of the world and are being much more conservative with the medications. And fortunately there are new very promising alternatives to the drugs.

Diet, sleep, health, exercise, or the lack of, and medications all have an effect on the brain, your child’s ability to process information, and thus to be stimulated and develop.

I have a confession to make. I do not get regular organized exercise. I played sports, and I played them hard. I have almost always lived where I had a good size piece of land and always loved working outside and work hard. I enjoy walks and hikes, but a daily exercise routine—never. It’s a good thing your child has parents and helpers to help structure their days, establish priorities for them, and to motivate them and make things fun. Perhaps if I had some great fun personal trainer who came and got me at a specific time each day and praised my success, I might exercise. I probably would also need to add a 25^th hour to every day. As adults we are responsible for ourselves. We can choose to eat well, exercise, whatever; however we are also responsible for our children, and it is our responsibility to see that our children eat well, get their sleep, and do all the other things needed to help them develop well. Even the smartest child isn’t wise. We need to make the choices for them and keep them heading in the right direction. Side note: How many of you give your pets more nutritious diets than your kids?

The younger the children, the easier it is to make things fun and increase the intensity. I constantly hear that little Johnny is bored with this or that or he doesn’t like it. The reality is that it’s not about the activity, it’s about the environment of the activity and how it is presented. Remember Tom Sawyer and how he got the kids to paint the fence for him? Create the right atmosphere, and you can get your kids to have a ball cleaning toilets. If something doesn’t hurt, you can create an atmosphere that makes whatever you are doing fun, and if something hurts, stop doing it because something is wrong. If you can’t get your intensity or their intensity above a 5, what should you do? You should go take a nap and come back to it later with good intensity.

One of the most common issues I see when watching program implementation is a lack of intensity when a child gets something right or does something well. I can observe someone working on processing, and the difference in the response when the child gets something right or wrong is almost indistinguishable. Often when reviewing program implementation videos, we have to pay close attention to see if a child got something correct or not because we can’t tell the difference from watching the reaction of the parent or caregiver.

Children of most any age will respond to your positive attitude and words of praise. If older children need something more to get their intensity up to adequate numbers, then explore some form of a positive token economy, where achievement as a reflection of their trying and doing something with sufficient intensity to impact their brains can purchase special privileges and such. But always let your child know that you are proud of them for their efforts and achievements. Don’t reward compliance that does not equate with intensity. Reward achievement even if you have to initially make it a bit easier for them so that they can experience success.

One of the most common killers of intensity is duration. Many of the activities we give children have a duration of only a minute or two, and the duration we give is a maximum. Maximum, not minimum. More often than not, more turns a positive into a negative. We encourage parents to, if at all possible, end an activity on a high note. Parents tend to continue an activity until the child has had it, and it turns negative. The result of that is the next time you go to do that activity the child recalls it as a negative, not a positive. Imagine giving your child the forbidden fruit—ice cream. You give them just a spoon or two and they love it and you stop. They want more. Now imagine that you gave your child a couple more of spoons of ice cream—still loving it—and then you gave them a small bowl. They’re still loving it, but not quite so much. Then make them eat a large bowl, having to force them to eat it over the course of an hour; and to really make it fun, make them eat more and more until they throw up. That would sure teach them to love ice cream. When should you have stopped? We have the ability to turn most anything that can be positive and fun into a negative. Remember: it’s all about intensity.

The big secret to success is intensity—the intensity with which your child takes in the input you are providing.

Intensity is not only foundational, it is mandatory: Get it?

 

Anything that adversely affects your child physiologically has a negative impact on intensity: Get it?

 

Any mediation that affects your child’s brain is likely to have a negative impact on their intensity: Get it?

 

What you do can affect your child’s intensity, but ultimately, it’s a matter of doing what works to create intensity in them: Get it?

 

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing; stop while you are ahead: Get it?

 

If your intensity or your child’s falls below a 5 and you can’t raise it, take a nap: Get it?

 

To be successful we need to provide your child with specific targeted input with sufficient frequency, intensity, and duration: Got it?

 

Good!

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 31 No. 8, 2018 ©NACD

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You want to build a house, so you borrow a hammer. Every day you pull out your hammer and pound on something—anything—twice a day for two hours. And sometimes you just hold the hammer and look at it or set it close to a nail. Certainly at the rate of four hours of pounding per day, not to mention the extra time spent in the presence of the hammer, you should eventually end up with a house, right? After all, isn’t a hammer for pounding? Don’t you need a hammer to build a house? And yet, after a year of this, you see very little progress towards anything resembling your dream house.

Obviously this is just a metaphor; so let’s get right to the point. You probably have some goals in mind for your child, or you would not have come to us at NACD. Some of your goals may simply be about getting to the very next step—learning to walk, to read, to chew. And some may be about the bigger picture—your child becoming an independent adult, going to college, being employed. Whatever your goals are, we are here to guide you in your quest to achieve those aspirations. We’re here to give you some tools and teach you how to use them. NACD parents are the cream of the crop. You are the ones who are willing to pick up that hammer, roll up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty doing the work. You don’t have to be an actual carpenter or electrician or plumber. But you do need to know how to use your hammer effectively to do some of the things a carpenter does; and you do need to know how to use your wrench correctly when we ask you to tighten a nut. It is your job to do the work; it is our job to make sure you know how to do it well.

The activities, materials, and programs that we recommend on your NACD program are just the tools you need in order to work towards your goals for your child. They don’t magically produce results just by being on your program or even by getting the “done” box checked next to them. How you use them is all-important. In an effort to improve the quality and effectiveness of your implementation and use of the tools, here are a few pointers:

Educate Yourself

Men get teased for not reading manuals. As a woman, I want a manual for everything! I wish my kids had been born with their own personal manuals tied to their leg. Then I wouldn’t have to figure out what to do when their own little individual needs come up. Just open the manual and see what works for them. It would be so much easier.

Your NACD program activities may sound straightforward when you read the name. But you really can’t know what it is we intend for you to do unless you get the instructions. We provide links to videos and handouts right there on your program. If something has been customized specifically for your child, the note about it will be in the “comments” section just next to the name of the activity. Watch each video and re-watch them. It’s very hard—if not impossible—to remember every detail of what you watched the first time. Review them again after you’ve started implementing the activities so that you can check yourself and make sure you are implementing things correctly. I learned a long time ago that doing something poorly over and over does not result in doing that thing well. That’s why I don’t like the saying, “Practice makes perfect” unless it’s revised to, “Perfect practice makes perfect.” Repetitively doing your program activities incorrectly will not bring about the results you desire.

Have Intensity

Frequency, intensity, and duration. At NACD we live and breathe those three words. You’ll read them over and over in nearly every publication we put out there. They are that important. You don’t have to worry much about frequency and duration— after all, it’s right there on your program, spelled out by your evaluator. You may not be able to achieve the recommended frequency or duration every day, but you don’t have to guess about what your goal is. But what about intensity? That is much more abstract; something that is totally dependent upon your performance. If you don’t quite have a handle on what we mean by intensity, go to our YouTube channel and watch Bob’s video titled, “Frequency, Intensity, Duration.” Even if you do think you have a handle on it, go watch this video anyway. It’s always helpful to be reminded.

If you simply go through the motions of doing your program and then check off the boxes, most likely very little change took place in your child that day. Your level of intensity can make the difference between changing your child’s brain and just taking up the time. You don’t have to be fun all the time. Let’s face it—some program activities just aren’t that fun. But you can have a high level of positive energy, whether you’re having a blast or not. And if you’re just not feeling it that day…well, “fake it till you make it,” as somebody said. It’s that important. If you act like an activity is a total drag, your child will believe it’s a total drag. If you’re just going through the motions, your child will rebel. Remind yourself frequently of why you are working this hard. Renew your commitment to your intensity, and therefore to your program, and to reaching goals.

Provide Input and Feedback

With your program activities being merely tools, they don’t change anything in and of themselves. It’s you who facilitates the change in your child by how you use those tools. Since electronic devices are all “the thing” in therapy these days, let’s use apps as an example. A child can drive on a racing app and have a great time, and the app has served its purpose. But for an app being used with a therapeutic purpose in mind, it is the tool, and you are the director of the activity. If you have used any of NACD’s speech apps with your child, hopefully you understand what I’m talking about. The app requires the child to repeat the syllable or word that is presented. However, the iPad has no way to respond to what the child said. As a matter of fact, the iPad doesn’t know if they said anything at all. If the child isn’t getting any feedback about how they responded, the tool becomes somewhat useless. It’s a great tool—it keeps you from reinventing the wheel and having to create all those materials yourself. But you have to sit with your child, encourage them to respond, and then give them feedback about their response.

• Praise: In an effort to maintain high intensity and show their child lots of positive energy, one mistake many parents make is in responding, “Good job!” when in fact the child didn’t do the activity correctly. Be careful of using “good!” all the time, unless their performance was actually good. Remember, you are trying to shape their behavior/performance/production so that it becomes more accurate and closer to what you are looking for. By telling them “good!” when it wasn’t good, they don’t know that they need to change anything. It is possible to remain very positive and yet be more appropriate in your praise. Here are some examples: “Almost! Let’s try that again.” “That’s a tough one, isn’t it?” “You sure are trying hard!” “Nice try!”
• Accuracy of feedback: In addition to providing appropriate reinforcers, it’s also important that you give your child feedback about what they need to do in order to change and improve how they did something. As a speech therapist, it’s easiest for me to use a speech activity as an example. Let’s say that your goal is to get your child to produce the /m/ sound at the end of words. So as a tool, I give you a list of words that end in /m/. If that list were magic, then you could just go through it and your child would automatically learn to put the sound at the end of words, right? That would go like this: “Say ‘mom.’” “mah” “Say ‘boom.’” “boo” And you continue to do this until magically your child starts putting the /m/ at the end. Except that it doesn’t work that way. You must give your child feedback—and accurate feedback—so that they can change what they are doing. Using the example above: “Say ‘mom.’” “mah” “MoMMMMM. Use your lips! Mommmm. Get the back on there….”
• Cueing: Closely tied in with the wording you use for praise and the quality of the feedback you provide is the way you cue your child. This is especially true for speech and language activities, as well as sequencing activities. If you are asking your child to do something, and things just aren’t working, change what you are saying. Have you ever seen someone try to speak in English to a person who doesn’t speak English? What do they do? They repeat themselves over and over, each time getting a little louder, as if somehow volume and repetition trump not knowing the language. Seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? In the same way, if your child doesn’t “get” what you are saying, say it differently. Change the words. Simplify. Restate. Provide a visual cue. You’re the teacher, so teach. Provide information. Provide help. Give them what they need to be successful with what you are asking.

Take Advantage of Us (aka, Ask for Help)

NACD’s model for working with kids is unique. But let’s be honest: the model only works if you hold up your end of the bargain and we hold up ours. We provide you with the tools, and you do the work. But what if you don’t understand something you are being asked to do? What if you think you understand it, but in reality you are doing it incorrectly? I doubt that any of you wants to spend three months working hard at doing something wrong. A critical aspect of making our NACD model work is the part where you ask us questions and you let us know what you are doing. There are three main parts to this:

• Initiate contact with your coach. Every NACD family has a coach. They are your direct access to your evaluator and all things “NACD.” If you have a question, ask them.
• Respond to your coach. Our coaches have a very hard job. When they ask you how things are going, they really do want and need to know. Not only do they have the responsibility of making sure you know how to do your program correctly, but they also provide your evaluator with important feedback that impacts your next evaluation and program. Please don’t ignore your coach. Interact with them and let them help you.
• Send us videos. We are good at what we do, but we aren’t psychic. We really do need to see what you are doing for a couple of reasons: a. If you are doing something incorrectly, we won’t know unless you show us what you’re doing. b. If something isn’t working and we need to switch gears, the easiest way for us to figure that out between evaluations is to see your child doing their program. We know that it’s hard to find the time to record your child and to post the videos for us. But believe us when we tell you that it’s time well spent.

NACD’s toolbox literally has over 3000 tools. And even with all of that, we frequently make up new activities on the spot, specific to a particular child we are seeing. Not only are we always trying to improve the tools we recommend, but we are also trying to improve your use of them and our education of you. We always say how we love kids. But really, we love our NACD families. We think NACD parents are the best, and we truly want you to be successful.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 27 No. 5, 2014 ©NACD

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Changing the brain (i.e., learning) requires providing the brain with specific, appropriate input that must be delivered with sufficient frequency, intensity and duration. Of the three components—frequency, intensity and duration—the least important is duration. Unfortunately, duration is the one component “education” tends to concentrate on the most. Most educators and legislators believe that “in order for our children to receive a good education, they need to go to school for six hours a day, 180 days per year, and spend 2.5 hours per day on homework and study.”

However, what children learn and how much they retain is not a reflection of how many hours they spend working at it. Rather, the intensity with which they take in the information determines how much of it is truly learned and will be remembered.

Unfortunately, as you increase duration you tend to decrease intensity. So, spending more time going over the same material can be counterproductive and actually slow down the learning process.

The brain responds to intensity. When information goes into the brain with low intensity, it has little or no impact on the brain. When information goes in with high intensity, it has high impact and actually changes the brain by stimulating the growth of new connections between brain cells. These new connections are required for “learning” to occur. A typical question asked about children with supposed learning disabilities is, “How come John, who after twelve years still doesn’t know his math facts, can tell you the statistics of every player in the NBA?” The answer is intensity. John is turned off to math and turned on to basketball. For John, math has low intensity and basketball has high intensity.

The primary goal in any learning situation is to turn the student on to the subject matter.

Just today, my son who is a college freshman told me he will be signing up for a physics class next semester. As we talked about his choice, I asked him if he remembered what his junior high science teacher had done with the bowling ball. He not only recalled the event, he recalled it with the same clarity and intensity with which he had conveyed it to me the day it occurred.

On that particular day my son’s science teacher Mr. Jenkins took his class down to the gym. The group entered the gym and discovered he had attached a rope to the very high gym ceiling. Hanging down at the end of the rope, almost touching the floor, was a bowling ball. Mr. Jenkins then proceeded to haul the bowling ball up to the top of the bleachers where he stood and held the ball to the tip of his nose. As my son and the rest of the class watched in amazement, the ball swung away from the teacher, across the gym, and returned to stop precisely at the tip of Mr. Jenkins’ nose. Intensity! I suspect that my son will never look at a pendulum or listen to a professor discuss kinetic or potential energy without thinking of Mr. Jenkins and his wonderful demonstration. I have often wondered how many future scientists were created that day.

Obviously most teachers and parents cannot replicate the demonstration provided by this gifted science teacher, but they don’t need to. Whether you are teaching your child to ride a bike, shoot a free throw, do algebra, or bake a cake, it is not how long you make them endure the lesson or how often you make them repeat it that will usually determine if they will learn it—and, once learned, will use and repeat it. Rather, how much learning occurs is determined by whether or not you taught them to love it.

Most children as preschoolers love learning anything. Tell a preschool child you are going to teach them how to clean a toilet, and they’re off running for a brush! But then, sadly, at the end of twelve years of “education,” many hate the thought of learning anything.

Teach them to love it.

Reprinted from the Journal of The NACD Foundation (formerly The National Academy for Child Development)

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 20 No. 1, 2007 ©NACD

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